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EVENTS
Clinton Street Theater first screens The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
giving hope to a whole generation of maladjusted freaks. Defying all predictions
and the laws of common sense, the Clinton Street will show the cult film
every weekend until the new millennium.
Beleaguered President Jimmy Carter plies Portland voters with
the promise of 9,000 new jobs and a $12 million grant for economic development.
After a day of handshaking and speeches, the ex-peanut farmer unwinds
with an overnight stay in a "typical Northeast Portland home."
WW calls Saturday Night Fever "ravishing and infectious."
It's hunting season on Portland jaywalkers when the Police Bureau offers
a prize to the first person to nab its decoy jaybird. The hunt
for the errant pedestrian is part of a monthlong educational program to
prevent the dangerous practice of crossing against red lights. Once the
campaign is over, warning citations turn real, and violators are fined
$5.
Retail mogul Fred Meyer, who built his empire from a horse-drawn
coffee wagon, dies at age 92 of a chronic heart ailment. Stores remain
open at the request of the pertinacious tycoon.
For almost five decades, it was a stark monument to the Automobile Age:
10 lanes of asphalt strangling the west bank of the Willamette. But Harbor
Drive is rubble now, its spell broken by the lush green grass of Waterfront
Park, whose first sections open this year.
Efforts by ranking officials at the Oregon Liquor Control Commission
to destroy incriminating documents lead to an awkward moment when OLCC
assistant director Charles E. Miller's necktie gets stuck in a paper
shredder. Gov. Bob Straub orders an investigation into the OLCC for
alleged abuses including illegal investigation of private citizens.
Discrimination charges plague the Portland Public Schools. In July, the
Portland district loses $450,000 in federal funding because of skimpy
ESL efforts. In December, activist Herb Cawthorne charges that the district's
desegregation plan is discriminatory and suggests busing white
kids to black schools as well as vice-versa. Superintendent Robert Blanchard
rejects two-way busing, however, and federal investigators find that Portland's
policies, while biased, are technically legal.
Bus riders breathe a sigh of relief as the Transit Mall formally
opens. Long after the bagpipes and bugle players have gone home, Bud Clark
will unveil his famous "Expose yourself to art" poster satirizing the
mall monuments, which critics deride as "sculpturally ignorant" and "sophomoric."
Hollywood promoter Tom Nash opens Key Largo in December, transporting
Portland's beautiful people to sound-stage Caribbean nights.
WW readers declare The BeeGees Artist of the Year and rate
as Best New Artist
a young singer-songwriter named Elvis Costello.
In the May primary election, state Sen. Vic Atiyeh wins the Republican
nomination for governor, ending a comeback bid by former Gov. Tom McCall,
and goes on to upset incumbent Gov. Bob Straub in November. Atiyeh's philosophy:
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
The year ends in tragedy when a United DC-8 carrying 185 passengers
plunges into two vacant homes and a wooded lot in east Multnomah County,
killing 10 people on board. The plane, which originated in Denver, apparently
lost power after circling PDX.
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HACK ATTACK:
BY MAC MONTANDON
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Baseball has its Abner Doubleday myth,
basketball its legend of Dr. James Naismith. But no one doubts who
dreamed up the Hacky Sack: It was
22-year-old Clackamas resident John Stalberger, who was looking
for alternative treatments for a knee injured during a pick-up football
game. Stalberger began juggling--with both feet--beanbags made from
handfuls of beans, rice and peas stuffed into two panels of denim
sewn together. By 1978, he had a patent for a new toy. Over the next
two decades, more than 50 million Hacky Sacks would be sold for more
than $150 million. |
Today, synthetic, 32-paneled Hacky Sacks are more commonly called footbags
and are used in a sport with a governing body, the International Footbag
Advisory Board. Footbagging is "not just a bunch of hippies standing on
the corner with beer bottles," says Stalberger, who helped market the Thigh
Master in the Northwest, among other products, and has been the president
of a business and marketing consulting company in Camas, Wash., since 1995.
A LINE IN THE
SAND
BY NICK BUDNICK
Born out of the utopian musings of a bunch of deep thinkers in the 1960s,
the Metropolitan Service District, popularly known as Metro, is a bold experiment
in regional government that has shaped Portland for better and for worse.
The agency as we know it began in May 1978, when voters passed Measure
6, which took the powers of the Columbia Regional Association of Governments,
or CRAG, and consolidated them into a Metropolitan Service District.
The result was a strange beast: the only true regional government in
the United States, one whose officials are directly elected by voters,
with real control over planning and development. For the three counties
and 24 cities in Metro's domain, the agency's control over federal highway
dollars is a powerful hammer.
At first the agency inherited jobs no one else wanted, like managing
the zoo and waste disposal. Following some early stumbles--attempts at
a trash incinerator and a flood-control district were foiled by strident
opposition--Metro's role has evolved to include planning, garbage dumps,
recycling, regional parks and the Oregon Convention Center, and the agency
boasts an annual budget of nearly $400 million.
But of all its sundry pursuits, Metro is best known for drawing a line
on a map.
In 1979, Metro drew the nation's first urban growth boundary, or UGB.
It was intended to contain development, protect surrounding rural areas
from sprawl and encourage a vital urban core.
Nowhere is the UGB more evident than along Springville Road in the Bethany
area of Washington County. There, on one side of the street, lies suburbia
in all its glory, the long rows of tract houses massed like foot soldiers;
on the other side, a rustic patchwork of hay and oat fields.
Many people believe the line is supposed to halt urban sprawl. It hasn't,
says Metro Councilor David Bragdon. "It has preserved farm and forest
land, there's no question about that. But has it made downtown Beaverton
a better place? Has it made Southeast 82nd Avenue a more pleasant place?
No, it hasn't."
The reason, says Rick Gustafson, who served as Metro's first executive
officer, is that the line was drawn way too large in 1979. Since then,
however, the region's population has swelled to 1.3 million, a jump of
32 percent. "What was too large 20 years ago is not too large today,"
says Gustafson.
Politically, that means the hard decisions have been left for today's
Metro Council. The main question facing the agency is whether new homes
for the burgeoning area's new inhabitants should be built on surrounding
forest and farm land, or whether the new population should be forced to
live inside the existing 236,000-acre metropolitan area, at a higher cost
to developers and homeowners.
The new council has decided to hold the line, causing the Portland homebuilding
industry to go berserk. Jane Leo of the Portland Metropolitan Home Builders
Association contends that the spiraling cost of housing explains why people
are moving outside the UGB--across the river to Vancouver, for example.
"People are moving to the suburbs," she says. "They're doing it for affordable
housing. But the jobs aren't there, so they're commuting in--which just
puts pressure on our transportation infrastructure."
As the stakes mount, political observers expect Metro Council elections
to become even more bitterly contested. Homebuilders are already rating
Metro Council elections as a bigger priority than higher-profile races
for the City Council. In 1994, homebuilder king Don Morissette waged an
expensive campaign to get elected to Metro, raising tens of thousands
of dollars. Historian Carl Abbott has said Metro seats may soon be equivalent
in political status to those held by state legislators.
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